Selling Your Most Personal Item: You

If you thought personalized advertising based on your Facebook status updates, Gmail content or online browsing behavior was creepy, just you wait. The era of genetic-based advertising is coming, and it could be just as profitable.

“Today, it’s such a niche market, but there’s tremendous growth opportunities there,” said geneticist Michael Schatz of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “In the endgame, it’s certain [genetics is] going to become one of the factors that big retailers would consider, but I think that’s pretty far off.”

Maybe not so far off.

Minneapolis-based startup Miinome is already building a platform that will help consumers control what offers they get from retailers based on their genetic makeup, and to possibly cash in on the value of their DNA by selling the data back to marketers and researchers.

“We believe we can make your genetic information useful every day, not just when you’re sick,” said Miinome CEO Paul Saarinen. “We’re the first member-controlled, portable human genomics marketplace.” Through an open API, Miinome will combine genetic and environmental data mined from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and run that through their proprietary algorithm to come up with a profile of you that’s richer than anything that exists on the internet today.

If, for example, you’re genetically prone to male pattern baldness, Miinome’s algorithm might be able to infer that environmental factors like stress or smoking could be contributing or accelerating your hair loss from your social media posts. If you choose to broadcast all of that information to Miinome’s business partners, they could show you very targeted ads for Propecia or nicotine patches, meditation, yoga or spa services.

The company, which is launching in closed beta this spring, will essentially be a repository and brokerage firm for your genetic information. It will allow its members to choose what academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies or marketing firms can take a peek at which of their genes. (Everything will be opt-in and Miinome business partners won’t get their hands on raw genetic data, Saarinen says.)

Saarinen thinks the financial promise of this kind of marketing is so big that he’s banking on the genetic sequencing part of his service being free. But you’ve heard that before — on the internet, whenever anything is “free,” you are the product. In this case, that statement couldn’t be more true.

Miinome, which boasts geneticist George Church and Autodesk’s Andrew Hessel as advisers, makes money every time one of your traits is accessed by companies. What price Miinome will charge their business partners for access to people with certain genetic traits will depend on demand. It’s economics 101 with your genetic information on the supply-side.

“That’s an interesting question, right? What genomic traits are worth more than others? I don’t think that’s been answered quite yet,” he said. His platform could help set the relative financial value for traits determining lactose intolerance, male-pattern baldness or risk for Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease.

Already, there are direct-to-consumer genomics companies that monetize their costumers’ genetic information. 23andMe’s partnerships with pharmaceutical companies like Genentech make up part of its revenue stream. The difference is that when you hand over your genetic information to 23andMe’s research arm — and 90 percent of its customers do, according to the company — you also don’t always have a say as to which research projects your genetic data is contributed. With Miinome, you’ll be offered control over how your genetic information is used and by whom.

For researchers, this could be a great opportunity to engage with their research participants and to learn more about their environment and family history; data that is currently missing from many genetic studies, but could impact our understanding of certain diseases, Schatz says. This has been a great selling point of social networks like PatientsLikeMe and CureTogether, which was recently acquired by 23andMe.

At first blush, Miinome’s model sounds like a great idea for consumers. After all, we’ve all complained about how we don’t really have ownership of the data we feed into the social networks we log into every day. But how can we know the true value of our genetic information? What are the security implications? How do we assess the risks of sharing our most private information with organizations whose goals and motivations might not always align with our own? How will sharing our genes affect our parents, siblings, children, and cousins?

And even if your personal data is made anonymous, as Miinome says it will be, there’s no guarantee it will stay that way. Earlier this year, geneticists at MIT’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research were able to identify research subjects based on their published anonymized DNA sequences. “We don’t really fully appreciate or understand all the ways these data could be interpreted,” Schatz said. “Once it’s out there, it’s really difficult, if not impossible to retract.”

If Miinome can build a secure network and gain the trust of consumers beyond just early adopters, they might actually have an interesting business model. The key will be educating consumers about how to share their information safely, along with building a platform through which data can be shared and unshared easily and in which the data doesn’t leave the confines of the Miinome service. That way, it’s at least in one place.